


my voice is back home while i’m in hell

by redtaillights



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, French Revolution RPF
Genre: Death, a bit spooky, inside robespierre’s mental collapse, so had to write about it, spoiler: the queen gets guillotined, there’s ghosts, this is a bit dumb, was sad thinking about robespierre in his last year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:01:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22271491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redtaillights/pseuds/redtaillights
Summary: some of them wore green leaves pinned to the lapels of their coats. others danced with dead flowers, whose bleached petals were torn off in the wind and blown asunder.
Kudos: 8





	my voice is back home while i’m in hell

**Author's Note:**

> this was written over a year ago and i was too lazy to go over it so it might be a bit trash
> 
> anyways i’ve always loved the french rev and especially robespierre so i hope this isn’t too bad. feedback is always appreciated:)

At the turning of the hour, Paris was vibrating with activity, her streets crawling with citizens all clamouring to glimpse the first comings of the parade. The city was electrified with anticipation and a few hours of brisk October weather could be forgiven for the excitement that awaited. Men and women had abandoned their work, children, forgotten their chores, to gather along the sides of the roads, where traffic had been diverted for the morning. It was a bold and boisterous scene, brimming with smiles, cheers and merriment.

In the apartments above the Rue Saint-Honoré, boarders and landowners alike peered from their windows, graced with a higher vantage point from which they could more fully survey the movement beneath them. An apartment, unique in its drawn shutters and shut window, stood poised above the clutter and noise. Its occupant had no stomach to endure the festivities below.

He sat on the edge of his bed, the sheets neatly tucked around the waning rigidity of his mattress. The roars of the crowd were but a dull echo in his ears, as if they came from a neighbouring apartment’s party in on which he could only wistfully listen, hoping to glean from amidst the music and chatter a sense of belonging. He clutched an open book in his hands, the words lost in a blur. He couldn’t hope to read them, and it was because he was sick. There was something in the air that day that made him sick.

He stood abruptly, book clutched in his thin and shaking hands, and the momentum of the movement sent a wave of nausea through his person. It passed, giving way to the more predictable upset he had come to know. He paced the floor of his room, vision swimming, only stopping to stand in front of his single panel window. In one ginger motion he pulled the wooden shutters open, only slightly, so that through the thin crack he revealed the late morning light could drift through and cast an arrow of luminescence into his otherwise somber apartment. It was a sunless day, truly, the sky grey and lifeless. There weren’t any clouds to be faulted for the cold and gloomy ambient; it seemed as though the sun had all but forgotten to rise at dawn.

The ashen expanse reigning above the city was emboldened by the grey paving of the streets, the houses lining them and their rooftops, all stone and shingles black as shadows in the night. When he raised his hand to the window it was a pure white, the moon against its sable backdrop. The only vibrancy to be noted were the red and blue bestrewn within the assembly, the drops of blood in their hats and flags and as playthings in the pockets of their children. Some of them wore green leaves pinned to the lapels of their coats. Others danced with dead flowers, whose bleached petals were torn off in the wind and blown asunder.

“Is Paris not beautiful in autumn?”

The young man slammed the window shut in an instinctive reaction, creating a crash like a gunshot that ricocheted off the walls. The room was again plunged into obscurity, and thus it took a couple breaths for him to realize the human form he saw upon wheeling around was not a projection of his shadow but something much more sinister.

“I quite like it in the winter, though. Don’t you, Max?” It paused. “Max, isn’t it?”

Max felt sick. “Yes,” he answered, his voice like a wisp of wind in the early morning. “What do you want?”

The figure advanced toward him, and Max recoiled, stepping far from the window. In the speckles of daylight that snaked through the boards of his shutters, Max discerned a more complete portrait of the intruder. He saw red, rich, deep, regal red, in the velvet and lace of his costume and dusted across his cheeks beside the imperial blue of his lustrous satin sash, the twain a blatant mockery of the tricolours engaged gavotting in the air outside. More offensive than that were the pigments of purple and gold, glaringly beaconing a crown and a thrown in their magnificence and wealth of refinement. Their owner had pale eyes, strikingly lifeless ones, which were round and sad on his face, and Max could only bear to meet them for a split instant.

“What do you think I want?”

“I don’t know,” Max swallowed. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

The ghost turned to him, and his form, the royal colours, the sad face, shimmered and threatened to dissipate into the air.

“I want justice, Max, from you.”

“It’s not my fault,” he replied. “You weren’t my fault.”

“Then whose fault was I?”

Max took a step forward. “Your own,” he snapped.

The air in the room had grown insufferably dense. Max felt its effects in his mind, and in his chest, suffocating his words as he suddenly found it unbearable to be in front of this apparition, this spectre. He staggered toward the door in his room, only to come face to face with another ghost.

“Marat,” Max breathed.

“Maximilien,” the ghost said, then turned to the other. “Your Majesty.”

Marat was much as he was in life, dressed in characteristic coat and fur lining, his cravat in intentional disarray, his large eyes full of fire and devastation. The skin of his neck, his face, were devastated themselves, marked and bloodied and tainted. A gift from the sewers, he had once told him. From when he had gone underground a lifetime ago, for protection and for fear of prosecution. He had only emerged when he was finally safe-- and then he wasn’t.

“I’m not mad.”

“Who said you were?”

Max scoffed, and shut his eyes, tight, so that his headache doubled in intensity. When he opened them again, Marat was still there, and the King still in his peripheral, and he near collapsed. “Why are you here?”

“Justice, Maximilien. Virtue. Terror. All of that.”

“I did nothing to you. I helped you. I mourned you--”

“You didn’t hold the knife, sure,” He gestured wildly, dead, but every bit as alive as he had been at the tribunal, spouting poison and breathing fire like he had been born with it in his veins, more like a god than a man. “But you think your hands are clean of our blood?”

Max shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Everything leads back to you. Capet. Brissot. Manon. Camille. All of them--”

“Camille isn’t dead.”

“--because of you.”

Max turned away from Marat, from the King, faced the blank wall of his empty room, and the distant glow of light he saw like a candle in a cell. “Camille isn’t dead,” he repeated, “And neither is Manon Roland.”

“And,” he pivoted sharply on his heel, beheld with accusatory eyes the two apparitions, “Who are you to blame me for Brissot? For yourself? You, champion of the people, who slept in the sewers beside the rats of Paris? Your savagery, your ferocious thirst for blood, assassinated you, and you, Louis Capet, king of the rich and the noble. You crushed your people under the weight of the gold in your pocket and cried treason when we demanded bread. You killed yourself. I didn’t kill either of you.”

He was so sick. His vision darkened and pushing past the ghosts, he shivered when they wavered like mist and touched his exposed skin with their cool, damp hands. He ignored the shadows that crawled from the ground and from the corner of his vision and stood, watching him stumble by with palms facing upwards in their outstretched hands. Again he pulled open the window, pulled the shutters to him and with a quick flip of the latch pushed the window out into the streets, where hung the heavy blanket of still frigid air. He gulped to breathe it in, like a fish caught on land, desperate for life again in his ailing lungs. The shock of the outside celebratory noise struck him like an arrow run through his throat.

Of course, the parade was coming. How could he have forgotten? He felt like throwing up. There were fifes and drums he felt tremor deep in his core, loud, unbearably so, joint in dissonant harmony with a school of voices raised high with cries of carmagnoles and cannons. Some sang, their voices old and young and strong and soft but as vibrant as never heard before in their unity, their one melody, their one anthem, one mind.

He mustered the courage to break from the magnetism of the celebrations, turned, and though he tried to meet their eyes, the ghosts, he couldn’t understand, couldn’t dissect as if they were no longer people he had known in life but promises of demons he would know in death. Marat stood like a maestro amongst a symphony of horror and nightmarish fiends whose talons, whose blood-painted cheeks and brows blinded, whose voices rang like church bells between his ears, clanging and crying with ominous sincerity and echos that lasted far too long to be from this world.

“You killed me,” they cried, and it was a lie, but Max was sure for all the anguish he felt they had pierced his heart with their claws, sanguine like the teeth of sharks, and torn it, still beating, from his chest.

“I didn’t.” His voice crumbled under him. “I didn’t.”

He didn’t. He couldn’t. To be swept away by the winds of a storm, the tides of war and revolution, is not murder, not even a casualty of war but a sacrifice-- a necessary evil. There would be periods of tears and terror but the Republic was a giant who survived on stemwares of wine-red blood, who could not be lost or forfeited to the annals of history, whose place in the future had to be cemented before its children too fell under the weight of their sacrifices. So there was no blood on Max’s hands. He was just a man.

“What happens today is nothing more than definitive proof you have lost your soul,” the King hissed, ghostly tenor rising above the din of disharmonious voices, “--and you will not be forgiven. History will not forgive you.”

“And what about it?” Max cried, the force behind his words shocking the mass into deafening silence. “What does it matter if I killed you, if I killed any of you? ‘The vessel of the revolution can arrive at port only on a sea reddened with the torrents of blood.’ If I kill you, it’s for the Republic. If I die, it’s for the Republic. No one, not you, not me, will ever be forgiven if we don’t give up everything we have, everything that’s good, that’s human about us, if we don’t accept that the scythe that slits our necks is wielded by liberty, by France herself, not by history but by the promise of tomorrow.”

Then his room was startlingly empty. Where his book sat discarded, its bay leather cover faced upwards, thin print and etched title staring down the dizzyingly plain ceiling above. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. ‘Its name belies it subject,’ Max thought, ‘for Caesar dies but it is Brutus, Cassius, and Cinna, the whole Senate, who go on living, and who taste the blunt wrath of the plebeians for the rest of the play. They killed Cinna, the poet-- thought him Cinna, who cried “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!” with blood still dripping from the tip of his knife-- and didn’t care. They didn’t care.’

Max went to close the window but found his hands frozen where they were pressed against the glass. The cries of the mob should have drowned out the rattle of the cart’s wheels against the cobble street, but Max heard it as loud as his own heart beating. In the tumbrel the Queen was cold, silent, not quite so glamorous anymore but made of a distant beauty in her white dress, her white hat, her white hair. She was alone, just as her husband had been. Just as Marat had been. Just as Max was.

He looked away. He was too sick to look. He leant against the wooden frame, the cool October air nipping at the nape of his neck. He didn’t see the blade fall, but he shivered at the telltale sound of Paris erupting into cheers.


End file.
